In a news article today about the new US tax bill, the writer said:
In one fell swoop, the Republicans have introduced some of the largest changes…
In one fell swoop is a pretty common phrase, perhaps almost to the point of cliché. But where does it come from, and what exactly does it mean?
I had another of those putting-two-and-two-together moments today. I was trying to elicit the word second from a student. This was in the context of saying a date. This is often quite tricky for French speakers. In French you refer to a date as, for example, le vingt decembre (today’s date). If you were to literally translate this into English, it would be the twenty December, as opposed to the twentieth of December. French speakers often therefore take a while to get used to adding the the and of, and using the ordinal form of the number.
Good question!
Recently, I’ve noticed, while looking at my blog statistics (it’s very addictive), that someone has been getting here by searching for the word train. Sometimes, it’s quite obvious which posts search terms bring people to. Other times, it’s not so clear. At first I thought that it was bringing people to this post, somewhat related to trains. But then, not really related either. I was curious, so I checked what posts people had read the days someone had searched for train.
It turns out it brought them to this post, about the term gravy train. And then I thought that if they were really looking for some information about the word train, that post would’t really help them at all. And then, I began to think that train is actually quite an interesting word…
Using the phrase in general today, it struck me that the word general is of course a military rank. As I began to think about the meaning of general as a military term, I thought it might be interesting to look at the origins of military ranks.
Hedgehogs are cute, aren’t they? With their little spines, and their noses, and their pink bellies when they’re being subjected to the 15th take of a video their owner’s making of them having a bath in the hopes it goes viral.
Quite simply, in the case of the Pacific at least.
English-Language Thoughts 